My experience with the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program began in September, 1999. Since then, the PFF program has allowed me to attend conferences and workshops, give talks at other colleges (and attend fellow students' talks at these colleges) and attend numerous seminars held here at Binghamton University. I have also participated in the mentoring program, and the teaching assistant seminar. While each of these activities were the result of my participation in PFF, they each helped my development in different ways.
Probably the most significant part of the PFF program is the series of talks at partner institutions. We have four partner institutions: Broome Community College, King's College, Ithaca College and SUNY Oneonta. Each semester, a graduate student from Binghamton University gives a talk to the faculty and students at each of these schools. In addition, schools such as SUNY Geneseo and SUNY Potsdam, which are not officially our partner institutions, invite our speakers to give talks on their campuses. These talks allow the speaker to address an audience other than the Binghamton University math department, and to prepare what will ideally become an interview talk when that student completes the PhD and enters the job market. Perhaps even more importantly, the occasion gives the graduate students who attend the talk an opportunity to speak with the faculty of the host school. This insight into faculty life at various institutions gave me a clear picture of the differences between various schools, and allowed me to choose the school which best fits my goals. Further, the ability to attend several of these talks, and to see the reactions to them by both faculty and students, gave me a better understanding of the art of teaching than I would otherwise have been able to obtain. An indirect consequence of the program has been that several of the graduate students at Binghamton, myself included, have been given the opportunity to teach at our partner schools, typically as a result of the talks made through the PFF.
The part of the PFF program I would rank as second in significance is the attendance of conferences. Each semester, the Seaway Section of the MAA holds local meetings, and every January there is a national joint meeting of the MAA, AMS, and SIAM. Before I became involved in the PFF program I never attended any of these meetings, despite the fact that one was held at Broome Community College here in Binghamton. Through the PFF program, graduate students are given funding for meeting fees, hotel accommodations and transportation costs to attend these meetings. The price for this funding is that the attending students must give a talk at the meeting, which itself is a benefit in learning how to address members of the mathematical community. What I found to be the key benefit, however, was exposure to the members of this community. Before my first conference I perceived teaching to be an interaction between an instructor and a group of students; while certain teaching methods tended to work universally, the actual learning experience involved a single teacher working alone. I saw no benefit to attending conferences other than to learn these universal methods, most of which could be found in publications anyway. That perception disappeared with my first exposure to the Seaway Section members. The concept of a group working together to refine and expand the discipline is easy to grasp when that discipline is Algebra, Topology, Statistics, etc. Applying that same concept to the discipline of teaching is far more difficult to understand, or at least it was for me until I saw it in action myself. That the PFF was paramount in causing this change in perception can be best demonstrated by the fact that only a handful of graduate students attend the conferences, and most of the ones that do are in the final year of their doctoral programs. Since the onset of the PFF program, Binghamton has had a disproportionately large percentage of the graduate students in attendance at all of the conferences.
Another part of the PFF program which I have found far more useful than I believed I would was the workshops and seminars held here at Binghamton University. Several times a semester, a faculty member from another college (frequently one which we visited with the speaker-series) would come to Binghamton to give either a seminar talk or a workshop. These presentations ranged from an explanation of the life of a new faculty member to exposure to the use of technology in improving teaching methods. These presentations were all beneficial, and reinforced the concept of teaching as a group effort, not an individual one.
The mentoring and peer-review programs were perhaps the most influential in my development as a teacher. Through the mentoring program, each graduate student in the PFF program is paired with one of Binghamton University's faculty. This pairing gives the student an advisor who is as important to developing as a teacher as the student's thesis advisor is to developing as a researcher. The peer-review program then allows the students to observe each other teach and share what they have learned from their mentors. After experiencing this program, several of us found it so helpful that we began a seminar for first-year students in an attempt to pass on what we had learned.
In summary, I would highly recommend the PFF program. For those students not yet in their final year who feel that learning to do research is a daunting enough task and the rest can wait until later, I can say that I once felt the same way and now I regret not starting sooner. Not only will you benefit from the program by becoming a better teacher, but by becoming an active member in the mathematical community your research will benefit and you will find new avenues of research you never before considered. Further, by allowing yourself to grow both as a researcher and a teacher simultaneously you will find neither task as daunting as it first seemed.